Miho Dohi at Crèvecœur

Miho Dohi’s work is a continuous physical experience leading to a mastery of form and a function impassivity. The Japanese artist, whose work is being shown for the first time in Europe, folds, cuts, turns, assembles and paints, with great gentleness, everyday materials: fabric, copper, wood, tape, paper, wire, and driven by impulse and intuition, seems to constantly change direction when objects fall, due to their altered centre of gravity. When these amalgams finally seem to «take shape», both inside and outside, then the artist turns them upside down, and an object appears quite naturally out of that chaos. She declares that «Once an object has completely collapsed, something that hadn’t existed in me becomes something that is there now.». Like unsolvable enigmas, the artist arranges her sculptures, always about the same size – about twenty to thirty centimetres – of indeterminate weight, on large pedestals or on the wall, as if to avoid blurring the narrative that flows from each of them. There is always the same title «buttai», always declined in numbers: buttai 70, 71, 72 etc. From certain angles, the sculptures suggest models. From other angles, they take on a biomorphic form. From others, masks. «Buttai» meaning «object» in Japanese: their interpretation thus remains unlimited for the spectators.

Miho Dohi was born in 1974 in Nara, she lives and woks in Kanagawa, Japan. Her works were showned in several solo shows at: Nonaka-Hill (Los Angeles), HAGIWARA PROJECTS (Tokyo) and Lulu (Mexico).

In 2020 she will present her first institutional solo show at the Renaissance Society (Chicago), and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.